Return to Sender

After my last blog post ( How High Can You Bounce? ), I had a couple of people comment on the difference between a Landing Page Bounce and an Email Bounce. 

    

An email bounce is when your outbound marketing message is returned undeliverable.  The Email Experience Council (EEC) explains that “emails can bounce for more than 30 reasons:  the email address is incorrect or has been closed; the recipient’s mailbox is full, the mail server is down, or the system detects spam or offensive content.”

    

All of these “30 reasons” fall into two categories – a hard bounce and a soft bounce.  “A hard bounce” explains Brian Anderson, Director of Web Marketing for Staples’ Quill.com business division, “can be defined as anything to the right of the [at] sign and a soft bounce is to the left of the [at] sign.” 

    

In other words, a hard bounce is undeliverable due to an incorrect address or a mail box that no longer exists.    A soft bounce is a temporary problem usually due to either the mail server being down or the mail box being full.  Either way, you can resend a soft bounce but should not resend a hard bounce. 

    

Reagan Taylor, email marketing consultant, gives some guidance on how to address bounces and other email issues as a regular contributor to Sundeep Kapur’s blog, Email Yogi.  She has some good advice – you should check it out. 

    

Until next time,

    

Dan